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Ethics

Performance Enhancement – Athletes are Victims not Delinquents

To describe the obvious power dynamic in modern sports industry from my personal point of view, I’m going to make use of a little metaphor. Therefore you have to imagine sport as a squash game played by several opponents. The competitors, hitting the ball from one corner into the other, represent the different stakeholders in elite-sports. Spectators, coaches, sponsors, national and international associations to mention a few. Of course there’s also one tiny ball incarnating the athlete himself as a kind of focal point, trying to satisfy the different demands. As a ball you’re certainly one of the most important parts of the game. But simultaneously you might be very easy to manoeuvre, because your being spherical, which could imply your lack of personal influence. Merely your ability to leave behind a little black marking on the squash court “wall of fame” is your only chance to colour your sport individually. As an elite sportsperson you’ve almost no opportunity to defend yourself against the prevailing key-players in the system. Otherwise you’re going to risk your career or even your status as a moral competitor. In the following lines, I’ll try to explain my position by disclosing the maladministration and mild coercion top-athletes are confronted with, emphasising four different issues of the “sports-system”.

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Between Life and Death…

A powerful BBC documentary, “Between Life and Death”, screened this evening on BBC One. The documentary (which can be viewed online for the next week in the UK) examined the life and death decisions made for critically ill patients with severe brain injury. Neuro-intensive care provides a way to interrupt the process of dying for such patients. But it raises difficult questions for medical staff and for families about the wishes of patients, the wishes of family members, and about uncertainty. Should treatment continue at the risk of the patient surviving in a severely impaired state? Or should patients be allowed to die, with the risk that perhaps if treatment had continued they may have recovered?

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Artificial Performance Enhancement in Sports – Are we Overreacting?

by Roman Gaehwiler

Within human history sport consistently has been abused as a platform of political disputes and athletes came to be exploited by governments to benefit the economy. The simple competitor has been transformed into a nationalized single warrior and pushed to represent his country as perfectly as possible. This spirit of the “idealized hero”, whose ability stands for the strength and force of a whole nation persisted until the twenty-first century. Of course not in the same dimensions, but there’s no doubt elite-sportspeople are a kind of mirror for society. In connection with the increasing influence of monetary incentives, a simple comparison of physical strength became an inexorable business. Excessive artificial performance enhancement is just an unavoidable result of that. The paradox obviously is that the audience calls for supernatural performances, but at the same does not approve the athlete to do so by taking performance enhancing substances.Therefore it’s legitimate to ask ourselves: “Are we taking sport too seriously?”

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Special Guest Blog – The problem of militarism

by Tony Coady

Israel’s decision to institute an inquiry into the military misadventure with the flotilla attempting to break its blockade of Gaza and its subsequent partial relaxation of restrictions on aid to Gaza represent grudging concessions to international outrage about the flotilla episode. Any recognition by Israel that its military policies are offensive to so many in the outside world is surely welcome. But the flotilla episode will be misunderstood if it is seen only as a failure in public relations or an instance of military mismanagement. Certainly it constitutes both of these since it has badly damaged Israel’s image throughout the world and alienated its few friends in the region as well as called into question the competence of its much-vaunted armed forces. But there is a deeper lesson to this tragic fiasco and that concerns the influence and failings of the spirit of militarism.

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On Knowing (or Not)

Judy is an intelligent, articulate woman with a great sense of humor. She is also completely paralyzed on her left side. Trouble is, she doesn’t know she is. On the contrary, she knows that she isn’t.

What’s going on? Self-deception? Denial? Puzzling examples like this are scattered throughout a recent series in the NY Times, which explores what it means to know, not know, know what you don’t know and not know what you know. Follow? Me neither.

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Australians support women’s access to late abortion


by Lachlan de Crespigny, Thomas Douglas, Mark Textor and Julian Savulescu

Regular calls to limit numbers of abortions are a familiar cry. Yet people are outraged if a friend or family member with a serious complication in much wanted pregnancy reluctantly requests an abortion but encounters resistance. Or when a woman faces a criminal court, as will happen to Tegan Leach next month in Queensland.

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Will you live to 100? Should we tell people that they have (or lack) the genes for long life?

In the news today – scientists have identified a cluster of longevity genes. From the Daily Mail A genetic test which tells whether you will make it to your century has been developed by scientists. The computer program will give individuals their odds of reaching the age of 100 – and tell them whether their… Read More »Will you live to 100? Should we tell people that they have (or lack) the genes for long life?

Ethical questions surrounding the BP Oil Spill

Largest oil spill in U.S. history continues to devastate
Gulf wildlife while the press and independent scientists are continually denied access to
spill site and surrounding beaches.

by Stephanie Malik

On April 20 a wellhead on the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling
platform blew out in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 40 miles southeast of the
Louisiana coastline. What BP had initially claimed would be a spill with
“minimal impact”, 69 days later now constitutes the largest offshore oil spill
in U.S. history. Today the well is conservatively estimated to be leaking at a
rate of 1,900,000–3,000,000 litres per day—though several expert estimates
based on footage of the spill suggest the actual rate is more likely to be 3 to
5 times higher than this. The unusually wide disparity in expert estimates is
due to the fact that BP has continually denied the requests of a number of independent
scientists to set up instruments on the ocean floor that could measure the rate
of the leak more accurately. “The answer is ‘no’ to that,” a BP spokesman, Tom
Mueller, said earlier this month. “We’re not going to take any extra efforts
now to calculate flow there at this point. It’s not relevant to the response
effort, and it might even detract from the response effort.”

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Foetal pain and the abortion debate: believing what you want to believe

By Janet Radcliffe-Richards

Last Friday’s BBC morning news headlines included a report of two reviews by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of evidence about foetal pain. The reviews concluded that foetuses under 24 weeks could not feel pain, because “nerve connections in the cortex, the area which processes responses to pain in the brain, does not form properly before 24 weeks”, and that even after that stage “a foetus is naturally sedated and unconscious in the womb”.

The corresponding article on the BBC website added the comment that “anti-abortion campaigners challenged the reports”. There were no details about the form these challenges took or who they came from, but as the reports were reviews of scientific evidence, it sounds as though a challenge to the reports must have been a challenge to the scientific claims. Of course scientific claims are always potentially open to challenge, so if the article had reported that scientists had come forward to challenge the methodology of key studies, for instance, or the way the reviews represented the data, we would just have known there was an ongoing scientific debate on the subject. But the implication of the BBC article was that people who were against abortion were challenging the scientific claims about foetal pain. And if this is true, it is interesting. Why should people with particular moral views (about the wrongness of abortion) or political ambitions (to prevent it) issue challenges to scientific claims? Most of these people are not scientists, and there is no reason to think they have special knowledge of nerve connections in the foetal cortex. So why are the challenging what the scientists say?

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The Cost of Non-Cash Incentives for Organs

The Times newspaper featured an editorial proposing changes in the organ procurement system last week by Sally Satel, a scholar from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. I thought the first few lines were especially revealing about Satel’s attitude to market transactions – she reports that she desperately needed a kidney herself, but dreaded “the constricting obligation that would surely come with accepting” an altruistic donation. She therefore “wished [she] could buy a kidney just to avert the emotional debt.”

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